Alice Coltrane: Universal Consciousness Album Review – Warungku Terkini

“Oh Allah” accentuates the interplay between Alice’s Wurlitzer and the violins, conveying a preternatural sense of drift. Rather than the four violinists entering en masse, there’s a natural fraying to this otherwise elegant sound. The strings switch between a monolithic mass of sound and a tactile messiness that imparts a visceral, live-wire energy. You would never mistake these strings as an attempt at Western classical, a buttoned-up Third Stream experiment, or the kind of sophisticated swinging fare of Charlie Parker With Strings.

The influence of Coltrane’s travels in India becomes most apparent on the second side of the album. “Sita Ram,” based on a bhajan chant she heard while there, featured Tulsi’s tamboura, with Alice layering little plucked upper register harp filigrees and her incantatory organ atop it. The music seems to breathe, rising and falling in unmetered fashion, an approximation of the amoebic alap section in Indian classical music, with Clifford Jarvis’ intermittent snares, bells, and shakers replicating the supple rhythms of the tabla. It would remain in Alice’s repertoire, performed in concert and even appearing in a new rendition on her 2004 comeback album, Translinear Light.

By early 1971, “Hare Krishna” was still rarely heard outside of Tompkins Square Park or on the Haight. And while you could recite that chant atop the slow-moving melody when Alice’s organ enters, the piece soon soars off into a rarefied air. The violins convey the disembodied sensation of your body cresting over a bank of clouds, with Tulsi’s tamboura, Jimmy Garrison’s bowed bass, and Alice’s organ supporting such flight, making for a sublime eight minutes of untethered sound. Experienced in the right frame of mind, it’s a downright transformative piece of music, as breathtaking as anything Alice ever set to tape.

Over 50 years later, Universal Consciousness remains an audacious statement, as white-knuckled on the hundredth listen or your first. There’s nothing like it in jazz or classical music, an assured amalgam of the two that is indebted to neither. Alice never settles or falls back into a previous pattern or musical concept. She’s restless as a seasoned mountain climber, revealing gorgeous new vistas yet looking ahead to the next peak. Universal Consciousness would be the last album recorded at the Coltrane home studio. Soon, Alice would receive a directive from the Supreme Lord to move to California and establish an ashram there. The music itself became a beacon to those attuned to its message.

A few years after its release, a young spiritual seeker named Purusha Hickson was volunteering at the One Mind Temple, a non-denominational church in San Francisco inspired by John Coltrane’s music. One day, while cleaning tables after a free meal service, an album playing in the background at the temple rose to the forefront of his mind. In his book Journey to Turiya, he described the sensation of hearing Universal Consciousness for the first time: “It was otherworldly. Ethereal. Cosmic…Pulsating celestial music flowed from the speakers.” As he gazed upon the photo of Alice Coltrane inside the gatefold, he had a divine realization: He knew that she knew. She was an enlightened being. Within a few months, Hickson would become Coltrane’s first student at her ashram. Her time as a jazz musician and famous widow was drawing down as Coltrane pivoted to her new role as a guru. In Universal Consciousness, there’s space for all of these lives to co-exist.